


The Gordian Reach

by Gammarad



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Southern Reach Fusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:01:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22334623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/pseuds/Gammarad
Summary: High school age intern Ahsoka Tano at the Battleship, HQ where they study the Endor Quarantine Zone in the Gordian Reach.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11
Collections: Return to the Iron Triangle - January 2020





	The Gordian Reach

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LittleRaven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/gifts).



The Endor peninsula had been, until 2065, one of the weirder places in the world, a swampland full of strange plants and animals that had either evolved there or hadn't survived anywhere else.

In 2065 it quietly became a quarantine zone. Global warming had led to its breeding tropical diseases to which locals had no resistance, was the public reason. No one would question that; it was happening everywhere.

But the Endor peninsula was home to a stranger contagion. The Zone barrier around it kept anyone out that didn't have access to the carefully controlled entry point: the headquarters of the Gordian Reach's Endor Control Zone, ECZHQ -- known to its denizens as the Battleship.

In 2083, one person who probably didn't belong there, but was happy she had been somehow granted admittance, was high school student Ahsoka Tano. She had finished all the available relevant high school courses, exhausted the local community college's curriculum as well, and had somehow persuaded her principal that the best thing to do was let her do an internship for independent study credit at the Battleship. 

The principal had said one of her friends, Dr. Kenobi, worked here, that she could talk him into taking Ahsoka as an unpaid student intern. Ahsoka had quickly agreed to do any work Dr. Kenobi asked -- anything to get out of the boring, stifling school and into the _real world_ where people studied the emerging biology of the Earth's new climate, not just rehashed the old botany of the past.

She'd arrived the previous morning and met Dr. Kenobi. He seemed really nice, not that she got to know him or anything because he immediately foisted her off onto his graduate student, Andy Walker. Ahsoka bristled at the abruptness. 

Despite his bland pretty white boy looks, so generic he reminded her of a cheap holo-generated sim, Andy was an okay guide to introduce Ahsoka to the weirdness of the Battleship. He showed her the cafeteria, with its experimental free food carefully labeled and the package-sealed safe ones on sale next to them, he showed her some of the labs (and the doors to the ones where she wasn't permitted, just to give her goals), and took her to the zoo, where the specimens from the Endor Quarantine Zone were kept. The EQZ, which the staff all pronounced "Eeks," was home to a lot of strange flora and fauna, only a fraction of which they'd managed to bring back.

"Not many of the people who've gone in on the expeditions come back," Andy said, half a warning, half a temptation. "The ones who did, none of them stayed on."

"What happened to them?" Ahsoka wanted to know.

Andy shrugged. "Different things. Retired, took time off, changed jobs, hospitalized. We don't send anyone in anymore in person."

"Robots?" Ahsoka perked up. She liked robots.

"We've tried it, they don't function well in there. Waste of money and equipment. Then they tried animals. The animals did great, but didn't come back. Well, except one." 

"Really?" Ahsoka coaxed him to continue.

"This German shepherd who was a retired service dog, he came back. Ran right to his handler after going in and everything. But the handler was weird about it. Said, he wasn't the same after, like... like he was a different dog. Looked the same, knew his owner, though. Maybe it was just that the owner had expected never to see his dog again? Like, he felt guilty for sending him in there and not expecting him back."

Ahsoka didn't see how that made any sense but she nodded anyway. "You bet. So what do they do now? How do they get more samples?"

Andy looked up at the ceiling for a moment, as if answers might be written on the blank ceiling. "They aren't saying. It's some big secret project. I have no idea. We could look into it, in our spare time. But first we need to go clean up after the doctors in Lab 3. Come on, I'll show you the protocols."

Part of why she liked Andy was that he didn't seem to resent having to teach her things he'd probably learned when he was her age, or a couple years older at most, like how to sterilize before and after lab work and how to make completely sure you got all the mold off glass, even the microscopic bits no one could see but that could contaminate entire experiments and ruin them. 

After he'd shown her a day's worth of laboratory cleaning process, which would make up part of the job she'd be doing here at the Battleship for her internship, Andy took Ahsoka to see the dog who'd come back.

He wasn't in the zoo proper, he had his own cell off to one side in a row of empty bedroom-sized ones. There was a dog bed and toys and food and water bowls and a little patio room with a couple real bushes and fake grass over the dirt between them. It was an attempt to be kind, but it looked like a horribly boring place for a dog to live in for the rest of his life. 

Over the next two weeks, Andy showed Ahsoka the rest of the tasks she'd be doing independently during her internship, helped her choose which of the open labs she wanted to assist in for the research part of her assignment. She picked the one Andy worked in -- they had a certain amount of rapport, Ahsoka thought, plus he was working on really interesting topics in RNA function and the differences shown in it between historical organisms and new ones from the EQZ. She met with Dr. Kenobi a couple of times, because he supervised Andy's research. 

She and Andy and a couple of the other graduate students were eating lunch. One, a white girl with super straight light brown hair, asked Ahsoka, "So where are you from?"

"Florida. I was born like fifty miles from here," Ahsoka snapped.

"But, I mean, what kind of name is Tano..." the girl didn't stop digging herself into a hole.

"It's Italian, I guess. My father's father's family was Sicilian or something." Ahsoka shrugged. Genealogy wasn't interesting to her like genetics was. Andy nudged her. Ahsoka sighed and took unnecessary pity on the girl. Who was like six years older than Ahsoka and really ought to know better. "My mother's family's Hindu and Ahsoka was a Hindu goddess or something." Ahsoka didn't feel like explaining details of that stuff, but this much might make her change the subject at least. "Like Sophia was for Italians." She shrugged. 

The girl didn't get the point. Ahsoka tuned her out and interrupted whatever it was coming out of her mouth next. "Andy, I ought to get back to work on that sequence thing? Can you let me into the lab?" Ahsoka had not been given her own key to anything. Which was its own annoyance.

"Sure, I'm done," Andy said, and shoved the rest of his sandwich into his mouth. 

As they walked back to the lab, Andy said, and to Ahsoka it sounded kind of like an apology for the rudeness of his fellow graduate student, "The A. S. on my badge, it stands for Anakin Sky." 

"Really? How'd you get Andy?" Ahsoka didn't think Anakin sounded too bad. 

"I was Annie as a kid. Then I had a bad year at school and got suspended. My stepfather read something saying boys called by girl names got into more trouble, so he made me start using Andy instead." He shrugged. "I didn't exactly stop getting in trouble."

"But you made it through college, that's what counts." Ahsoka gave him a grin. "Hey, this isn't the lab." 

He'd brought them to the side annex of the zoo, where the dog was kept. "Yeah. I thought we'd go visit the pup," Andy said. He unlocked the door.

What Ahsoka saw made her freeze in the spot. Behind the glass of the room next to the dog's was one set up clearly to house a human being. A single bed with a blanket, a desk with a lamp and a chair. Asleep in the bed on his side, eyes closed and facing the glass, was Dr. Kenobi.

"It's," Ahsoka said, her voice catching on the name.

Andy shook his head, pressed a finger to his lips.

When Ahsoka looked closer, she could see differences. The man in the bed looked younger, thinner, and sicker than Dr. Kenobi had when she last saw him two days earlier. If he hadn't had the lines on his forehead and darker circles around his eyes, he might have looked Andy's age or even less. 

She tore her eyes away from whoever -- whatever -- was asleep in that cell to look a question at Andy.

"Yeah," he whispered, barely a breath of voice beside her. "Found out how they're exploring the EQZ now. Clones. He's the first one to come back."

**Author's Note:**

> They wind up calling him OB2.


End file.
